Grove Koger

On our second day in Portugal last year, we took an excursion through the waters of the Parque Natural da Ria Formosa, or Ria Formosa Natural Park, in the eastern Algarve. Nearly 45,000 acres in size and running some 37 miles along the country’s southern coast, the park is a complex of marshes, beaches and sandy, low-lying islands.

The tour we’d booked with Islands 4 You carried our small party from Faro’s waterfront through a shallow channel and into a broad lagoon, passing shore birds and storks and the occasional beached mollusk (below) along the way. We enjoyed an hour of swimming in the warm water off uninhabited Ilha Deserta, but the tide was coming in and we had to move our sandals up the beach more than once.

Confusingly enough, Deserta is also known as Ilha da Barreta, while the southwestern end of Ilha da Culatra, one of our next stops, is sometimes referred to as Ilha do Farol. But Farol is actually the name of the principal settlement on Culatra—an attractive, low-key community of cafes and holiday cottages on the southernmost point of continental Portugal. Its sandy soil is planted with succulents (including some impressively large agaves) and bright bougainvilleas, and it was an ideal spot for a lazy lunch on a bright August afternoon. A longer visit would allow time to swim in the gentle surf off the Atlantic shore of the island, and we hope to rent one of those cottages the next time we’re in the Algarve.

The Portuguese word for “lighthouse” is farol, and, appropriately enough, Farol also is the site of the imposing, 151-foot lighthouse of Cabo de Santa Maria (shown at top). Named for the cape near which it stands, it’s the tallest lighthouse on the coast of the Algarve. The structure was built in 1851and increased in height in 1922, a step that apparently made it unstable. As a result, it was given a kind of concrete exoskeleton few years later. Today it’s maintained by a department of the Portuguese navy.

We’d set off that morning near low tide, and our captain had threaded his way cautiously through the shallow channels. But by the time we sped back that afternoon, the water in the lagoon had risen several feet, and the shores we had skirted only a few hours before had disappeared.

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Islands 4 You offers several tours. To learn more, see islands4you.pt/.